Monday, September 28, 2015

It doesn’t have
to be fiction. Think about Galileo, when
everyone around him said the sun orbits the Earth, risking prison and exile to
prove otherwise. Think about Einstein, a
random patent clerk coming out of nowhere to totally upend modern physics. Or, if fiction is your thing, imagine
Professor Challenger doggedly trying to convince the Royal Academy that
dinosaurs still live. Or Milo Thatch getting
laughed out of the room for his crazy theories about Atlantis.

There is
something all of these stories have in common.
The entire scientific establishment believes one thing. A lone genius
believes the other. Everyone shouts him down until finally, the genius shows them all.

That’s the
exciting science story. And it’s a story
that is uniquely emblematic of what scientists believe about themselves. That everyone can be mistaken, that one
thoughtful, brilliant person can prove them wrong. And that
person becomes a hero for future generations.

It’s effective,
too. The lone genius story fits nicely
into our love of underdogs, of heroes who overcome the odds when everyone has
counted them out. No doubt these stories
have done a lot to glamorize science, and given kids role models to
start them down the path to discovery.

But they have
also done a lot of harm.

The valuable
lesson in these stories is to question everything, because anything you have
been taught might be wrong. But imagine you
aren’t trained in science. You see one
researcher come out with a wild new study linking, say, vaccines to
autism. Totally earth-shaking. And you see a bunch of stuffy old “establishment”
types shout that researcher down. They
get everyone to renounce his findings, destroy his career, make him a laughing
stock.

You immediately
know what movie you’re watching. You
know who the hero is, and who the villains are.
You know not to trust the overwhelming consensus, because in every story
you’ve ever heard about science, the consensus was proven wrong. The crazy guy
nobody believes? He is always right.

Evolution,
genetically modified food, global warming.
There are smart people who have counterfactual beliefs on these
topics. And it’s not because they don’t
believe in the scientific method. It’s
because science itself has told them to be skeptical of widely-held beliefs.

If you spend ten
years of your life studying environmental science so you could spend five more
years conducting an experiment that adds one more data point to the evidence
that human beings are causing climate change, you’re a very successful
scientist. But you aren’t going to have
a movie made about you. And you aren’t
going to get invited to come onto a cable news talk show. It’s not a narrative that resonates, but it’s
what 99 percent of real science is.

I’m not
suggesting that we all blindly respect expert consensus. That is, after all, antithetical to the scientific
process. But we do need to be a little
more careful about the types of studies we consider groundbreaking, and the
types of people we view as lone geniuses.
Have we actually done our homework, or just read about something on a Tumblr post? Are the
research methods sound? Is the study
funded by a biased special interest group?
Do we even know enough about the subject to have an opinion on it?

Because science
is different from literature. Just
because it makes a good story doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile.

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Two nights ago, I had a conversation with a barred owl. It was only singing in its ascending cadence, not its trademark “who cooks for you.” I answered back as best I could, using my cupped hands as a whistle. That’s a trick I’m proud of. The owl called and I responded, and we talked like that for a few minutes.

Then last night, as I drove past that same area, a barred owl swooped down from a tree and stood in the gravel road in front of me. The intricate stripes all over its body made it look like a topographical map of itself. Surely it was the same one I’d talked with. It stared into my headlights with its perfectly round face for five or six seconds before flying away.

I put the car in park for a little bit, unable to move. The moment, locking eyes with that huge bird, was so pregnant with meaning, but I couldn’t quite grasp it. Looking back now, in the light of day, I can feel that near-revelation slipping away from me.

But it left me feeling like I understood augury. According to the Greeks and Romans, you could predict the future by watching birds, observing their behavior, listening to their calls. They say Tiresias discovered how to do it. An owl's call or a dove's flight could mean any number of things, for good or ill, setting new dates for battles or elections. The Roman army used to carry chickens around, just so magicians could observe signs in when and how they ate.

And, like any other form of magic, it’s easy for us to distance ourselves from it, here in the 21st century. For those of us who mostly just see pigeons and grackles, augury seems wildly naïve. Of course, like many elements of our mysticism-filled past, it still echoes in our language. The word “auspicious,” for example, comes from Latin for “watching birds.”

But I think the Romans were on the right track. In fact, after last night, I’m sure of it. It’s not that the barred owl was trying to tell me the future, exactly. But there was something behind it, some greater, wild, terrible something. And the way to experience it is by carefully watching the natural world, turning yourself to the life that surrounds you.

Observation is the key to understanding, that much is clear. Not just looking at the life around us, but paying attention. There is some magic in the complexity of an ecosystem, in the vast sweep of geological time, that is invisible at first glance. The more you look, the more you see, until you start scratching at Melville's little layer lower, tracing the features of the unknown as they slip from behind the pasteboard masks of the everyday.

Augury, at its literal and etymological heart, is just looking at birds. It's a place to start.

Friday, August 21, 2015

There isn’t much to see in
Monroeville, Alabama. There is the
courthouse where Atticus Finch defended a black man against white accusors, to
a white jury. Except, well, Atticus is a
fictional character. Not even Gregory
Peck, during the filming of To Kill a
Mockingbird, argued a case there.
That happened on a set in Hollywood.
There is a museum in the courthouse, with the little trinkets Boo Radley
left for Scout – the watch and the dolls and the gum. Only, again, that didn’t really happen. There is a gift shop.

Harper Lee grew up in
Monroeville and still lives in the area, but for people looking for any sort of
real connection to the world of Mockingbird,
the town is a bit of a bust. Besides a handful
of touristy concessions (the Mockingbird Café, for instance), it’s just like a hundred
other small Southern towns I’ve driven through or lived in. The air by my hotel smelled like wet dogs and
old french fries. Lee’s childhood home
is torn down, replaced by a grimy-looking restaurant called Mel's Dairy Dream. At the time of my visit, it didn’t seem to be
open.

But tourists go there, to the town, to the museum, to the
Mockingbird Café, hell even to the Dairy Dream.
There are millions of people in this country who were deeply moved by To Kill a Mockingbird, who learned how
to be decent, gentle, strong adults from Atticus Finch. And I’m one of them.

So of course, I was excited about Go Set a Watchman. The day
news of its publication broke, I went online to say it was “a great day for
fans of American letters.” Then,
gradually, my excitement began to flag.
This wasn’t some sort of lost masterpiece, I learned; it was a rejected
draft of a project that later became Mockingbird. Serious questions were raised about the
degree to which the 89-year-old Lee consented to publishing this work,
something she had always staunchly opposed. And then reviews came out, saying the
work was full of longwinded political conversations with an aging, racist
Atticus Finch. By that point, I no
longer had any desire to read Watchman. I still haven’t decided if I will.

But while I dithered, pundits, reviewers, and critics all
across the nation succumbed to some kind of mass hysteria. The review in the New York Times said Watchman gave Atticus “a dark side.” The
AV Club said that Lee deliberately “overturns the mythos of Atticus Finch.” And then, the floodgates opened.

Watchman arrived on the scene at a crucial time in American
life. A cynical man might even say an “opportune”
time. After five years of mainstream
white America proclaiming that a black president meant racism was over, the
illusion of a postracial society came violently tumbling down. Riots and protests are on the news. Young black men are getting shot by police. I know there were many of us who would have
loved nothing more than a kind and thoughtful word from Atticus Finch, to tell
us that we need to have empathy and respect for all people. But instead, we get a new book where – twist!
– Atticus was a racist the whole time.

It’s the sort of thing that you almost can’t help writing a
thinkpiece about. And there were lots of
them, touching on everything from Jim Crow politics to the death of the white savior myth. Watchman was the perfect entryway into
any sort of article about how racism doesn’t go away. It can be found everywhere: even in Atticus
Finch.

I don’t want to detract from the idea behind some of those
pieces. Many of them make thoughtful and
important points - prejudice can indeed be found even in the supposedly sacrosanct. But, as a literary
critic, calling Atticus a racist doesn’t make any sense.

Intertextuality is a tricky thing. Many works of fiction relate to one another,
many can be placed in dialogue with one another, and some reveal different
aspects of a character through different events. Sometimes, it’s clear how two texts fit
together. On the other hand, people have
spent years trying to figure out if Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury
and Quentin Compson in Absolom, Absolom! are really the same character.

Other, equally devoted people, concoct elaborate theories on
how James Bond can appear as half a dozen people in the span of 50 years.

Those problems can get thorny, and require lots of
research. Luckily, that’s not the
problem we face when looking at Atticus Finch.

In reading Mockingbird
alongside Watchman, critics are attempting
to read a novel and an early draft of that same novel as coequal texts. This demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of
how characters function within a fictional work, seeing character as a reality
outside of the page rather than an aspect of how a story is told.

Characters serve a work.
They are one of the elements an author can employ to create
meaning. Lee wrote a novel called Go Set a Watchman, and with the help of
a talented editor, that novel became To
Kill a Mockingbird. The setting and
tone changed during that process, and the focus of the plot shifted from arguments about race relations to demonstrations of race relations. And as that happened, the characters were reimagined. That’s an easy thing to understand. It happens to projects all the time. Watch the Black Friday reel – Pixar’s
original animatic of Toy Story in
which Woody is a vindictive sociopath.
Or even earlier work, where Woody is a terrifying ventriloquist dummy. As those works evolved, so did their characters.

Yet there is something about Atticus Finch which resists
this idea. It is difficult to think of
that man as a mere narrative device, a tool used by Lee to tell a story. Atticus has become so real to many of us that
an “initial draft” of his character doesn’t make any sense. We want to think of him as Harper Lee’s
actual father, concrete, someone we could have met. If that is true, then anything Lee wrote about him would reveal a new aspect of his personality. But he is a fiction. He was made up. When we accept that fact, Watchman becomes nothing more than a literary curiosity.

It’s hard to do, though, to keep your mind wrapped around it. Mel’s Dairy Dream all over again. We are, I am, desperate to see some sign of Maycomb,
Alabama. Where a grown adult can stand
up for human dignity, even as everyone around him loses their minds. It should be real. So we
go, we read, we try to find the beauty at the heart of Mockingbird in a broken, nonfiction world. But all we have here is Monroeville, where
the lady in the gift shop will sell you Go
Set a Watchman as if it were a new revelation.

No, if we want to find Atticus Finch in this
world, the only thing we can do is start acting like him.

Monday, August 10, 2015

The scariest part of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein isn’t that
the Doctor’s creation is a monster. That’s
just not something that figures into the story very much. The green-skinned, plodding, moaning terror
which we usually imagine, the irrational, man-child walking with arms
outstretched, is entirely at odds with the events of the novel. In the book, Adam (that’s the monster’s name)
is eloquent, thoughtful, and athletic.
And he goes about ruining the life of his creator in precise, surgical
ways, destroying everything young Victor Frankenstein holds dear.

It’s scarier that way, I think. The terror at the heart of the book is the
way it puts reanimated corpse flesh on the old idea that we create the means to
our own destruction. Not only that, but
our creations can destroy us in more painful and personal ways than our enemies
could ever imagine.

I’ve been thinking about this because of Donald Trump. The internet is full of commentators right
now who are convinced that the entire natural order has been turned on its
head. Cats and dogs are living together,
hot snow is falling up, and Donald Trump continues to lead the Republican
primary race. Everyone is astonished. From the very moment Trump declared his
candidacy and simultaneously called all Mexican immigrants rapists and drug
dealers, his implosion has seemed imminent.
But right now, with the first debate out of the way, The Donald is still
going strong. And Republicans and
Democrats agree, he is doing lasting harm to the GOP.

Trump is a monster, but I don’t think he’s an idiot. I don’t think he is a rampaging corpse,
terrified of fire, derailing more feasible candidates through sheer brute strength. No, I think Trump is the other kind of
monster – one perfectly created by the right wing to destroy itself.

It’s a clear fact that conservative media is an echo
chamber. It’s easy to find analysis of
how often people who rely on Fox News, Breitbart, talk radio, and the like as
their main source of news have wildly erroneous or counterfactual beliefs. Fox News reports extreme opinions and
distorted versions of events so consistently and often, it begins taking those
things as fact. Bruce Bartlett,
who was an advisor for Reagan and a Treasury official for Bush 41, calls it “self
brainwashing” in this excellent scholarly article, which offers lots of good
examples. If you’re interested in what
an ideological echo chamber looks like, read his analysis. I can’t describe it better. But I really don’t think the far-right
ideology Fox News generates as it consumes itself is what created the success
of the Trump campaign. For that, we have
to look deeper into conservative media.

There is another echo chamber in the world of Fox News, one
that both undergirds and parallels the political one. A rhetorical echo chamber.

By creating a machine with the dual aims of political
indoctrination and ratings generation, conservative media has developed a
unique flavor of hyperreal bombast which is very easy to recognize. The main assumptions of this mode of
dialectic are these: that mainstream media lies, that rudeness is synonymous
with honesty, that political correctness is an insult to freedom, that
complexity is a form of weakness, and (most importantly) that the loudest voice
is always correct. It is such a clearly
defined style, Stephen Colbert was able to satirize it for 1,447 episodes
straight. “Fox is not really about politics,” media critic Michael
Wolff noted way back in 2002. “Rather, it’s about having a chip on your
shoulder; it’s about us versus them, insiders versus outsiders, phonies versus
non-phonies, and, in a clever piece of postmodernism, established media against
insurgent media.”

Donald Trump quickly found a home as a frequent Fox News
guest and contributor, because, let’s be honest, the man can play just as good
a caricature of a conservative blowhard as Colbert ever did. He jumped into the rhetorical echo chamber
with both feet. And as the years went
by, the mechanics of conservative media taught more and more of the Republican
faithful that tact was disingenuous, that diplomacy was for cowards, that
apologies were never necessary, and that shouting your opponent down is the
purest form of debate. Watch Fox News,
and you’ll understand – this is a constant subtext present in everything from
their interviews to their graphic design.
It used to be a ratings conceit for the network, something to set it
apart from stuffier news sources. But
now, for millions of Americans, that Fox News tone is what “brave” and “honest”
is supposed to sound like.

It’s hard to blame conservative media for trying to be
entertaining. Fox News has succeeded in
spreading panic and paranoia as a means of energizing a dwindling conservative
base in the US, keeping the Republican party a major national force even though
they have become estranged from women, minorities, and young people. The network injected some nitrous into the
sputtering engine of conservativism, and now the whole thing is on the verge of
blowing out.

The GOP has moved into positions which reasonable people are
having harder and harder times supporting.
Fighting equal rights. Ignoring scientists. Causing a government shutdown. Spending hundreds of government hours
attempting to take healthcare away from people.
Rubio and Walker both think abortion shouldn’t be legal, even if the
mother’s life is in danger. But Trump
doesn’t seem to share those crazy ideas exactly. In fact, it’s hard to know what Trump
believes in, other than himself. The
only thing we know for sure, and the only reason Trump has been so successful,
is that he speaks and acts like Fox News incarnate.

The Donald is running a high-risk campaign as the pure
truthiness candidate. It could, as
people have been predicting, fly off the rails at any moment. But it is a calculated risk, and a very solid
political play. The Republicans have to
counter him by trying to sound rational and diplomatic (which, conservative
media has taught us, is how losers sound), or trying to out-crazy him, which is
impossible for anyone with self respect. Fox News may eventually decide they
want to stop him, but right now he is just too good for ratings. I don’t doubt that Trump could win the
nomination. He couldn’t win the
presidency, not by any means. But he has
good odds of beating any current GOP opponent.
And with that, the days of the Republican Party as a viable choice for
rational men and women would come to a sad, if entertaining, end.

David Frum, a speechwriter for Bush 43, told ABC News, "Republicans
originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for
Fox. And this balance here has been completely reversed. The thing that
sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican
party."

The archconservatives and GOP talking heads behind modern
far-right media built a machine of misinformation and spectacle, in which it
was better to be mean and loud than thoughtful and nuanced. And the monster that machine made possible
won’t just lumber around and frighten the villagers. It’s coming for the Republican Party.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

I heard a science fiction writer speak a few years ago, and
someone asked him about past dreams of the future. Sci-fi has predicted or inspired a lot of inventions
and developments over the years, the man in the audience said, but what was the
biggest failed prediction to come down the line? I’m sure he was thinking about flying cars or
robot butlers. I was thinking about the
hover skateboard from Back to the Future Part II.

The author didn’t even have to think about it. Without missing a beat, he said “That there
is a future for manned space travel.”

The air went out of the room as if every sci-fi geek
in attendance had just been punched in the gut.
I was only there as a volunteer to help with the event, not as a fan,
but even I was staggered by the writer’s flat pessimism.

After all, it’s not like spaceflight is a mere science fiction
accessory, like aliens or laser guns.
It’s the foundational idea of the genera. I can think of a handful of works by Bradbury
or Asimov that stay squarely on Earth, focusing on robots or time travel. But none that discount space travel
entirely. A sci-fi writer who doesn’t
believe in space travel is like a western writer who doesn’t believe in horses,
or a romance writer who doesn’t believe in heaving bosoms. Without that, what are you even writing?

Throughout the history of science fiction, the question
hasn’t been “will there be humans in spaceships,” but “what will the spaceships
be like?” Generally, they parallel some
form of technology we are already familiar with. In Star Wars, for example, most of the
spaceships are like airplanes, looping and rolling in aerobatic dogfights. Or in Star Trek, spaceships are ocean
vessels, pressing forward with a large crew to explore new territory, sinking each
other with torpedoes. Or in Firefly,
spaceships are stagecoaches, a way for outlaws and other desperate folk to make
their way across a dangerous, wild frontier.

We as human beings and tellers of stories are drawn to these
familiar dramas set among unfamiliar stars.
We take the technologies we have, and the science we understand, and
project ourselves into space, because that is the next place we are headed. And we have been doing it since before the
enlightenment.

The reason more people don’t know about The Man in the Moone
by Francis Godwin is beyond me. This
book, written in the 1620s, is one of the first real novels in the English
language, and (I would argue) the first true work of science fiction. It tells the story of an adventurer named Domingo
Gonsales who, shipwrecked on an unexplored island, discovers a new species of
bird. It’s a sort of large goose, and
Domingo finds out that it can carry unusually heavy objects. So naturally, he decides to create a machine,
tie a handful of geese to it, and leave his island in style. Domingo flies around in his goose-drawn
carriage for a while, having adventures, until (twist!) the geese decide it is
time for them to fly to the moon.

The fact that some scientists once believed that birds
regularly flew to the moon is the subject of a wholly different essay (in fact,
here is a good one on it). Suffice it to
say, in the 17th Century, naturalists were still trying to figure
out why certain species of birds disappeared for half a year at a time. Some suggested that birds hibernated, others
that they changed shapes. One
hypothesis, new to the scientific journals around the time The Man in the Moone
was written, was that some birds just fly to the moon when the weather on Earth gets too cold or they don’t have
enough food. It was a theory that was so, so very close to
figuring out how migration works, but was still deeply and exceptionally wrong.

The staying power of the science behind this book, however,
doesn’t really matter. The interesting
thing is this: since the very dawn of the scientific revolution, for as long as
human beings have had been discovering new things about the natural world and
transforming those discoveries into technology, we have dreamed of leaving this
world. Francis Godwin lived at a time
when the most advanced form of transportation he could imagine was “seat pulled
by animals,” but damned if he let that stop him from hitching his wagon to
something that could take him to the moon.
There are other, slightly older stories of humans visiting the moon by magic,
or in dreams. But The Man in the Moone
is different. Gonsales makes a discovery
(a new, stronger goose), uses that discovery to create an invention (the
goose-drawn carriage), and uses that invention to make more discoveries,
exploring the lunar surface and chatting it up with the native moon-men. I find that deeply beautiful, in ways that I
am not sure I can accurately describe.

And I think it’s a powerful refutation of the pessimistic
sci-fi writer I heard speak. The
problems inherent in manned spaceflight are deeply complex, that’s a fact. But for 400 years, we have been daydreaming
about ways to make it possible. Love of
adventure and exploration wasn’t a passing fad – I can’t imagine a future where
technology continues to progress but nobody wants to use it to visit Mars. We have always had our eyes on the
frontier. It’s just a matter of time
before we find a big enough goose to take us there.